Monday, April 20, 2009

Twitter on Steroids

The Twitter interface is an ugly environment. In spite of itself, there are 32 million twitters and growing.

In the keynote speech at the 2009 EntConnect conference, Bill French reminded us that. Since I’m hooked on Twitter and my followings have been increasing, I see what he means. I’m becoming overwhelmed, which kind of defeats the purpose of getting connected and starting a conversation in the first place.

One busy entrepreneur asked about the Twitter “Signal to Noise Ratio,” - that is tweets of interest versus the irrelevant. Truly one person’s noise is another person’s signal. How do we manage this?

Tweetdeck, an Adobe Air desktop application, was offered as a solution, which I am now using. It allows me to create groups, so I miss fewer tweets of interest. Yet, if I don’t frequently monitor the interface, older tweets can quickly roll off my TweetDeck and I still miss them. Also, I can’t use more than 10 columns, which is a limitation on creating multiple groups.

Bill demonstrated Twhirl, another desktop client. It can customize your dashboard so that more than one twitter account can display your tweets of interest in one neat column. Also, Twitter allows searching on keywords via search.twitter.com, which pulls out tweets from the public timeline.

Another serendipitous find was from a twitter tweet tip, “Twitter tips & apps for journalists & everyone else.” This busy journalist listed many useful twitter applications on her blog:
assignmenteditorminds.blogspot.com/2009/03/twitter-tips-apps-for-journalists.html

I like what computers can do for me, but not what I have to do for computers. So I see a great future in the user friendly twitter applications which can be easily customized.

Do you have favorite user friendly applications? Any suggestions on how to effectively manage your tweets?


Related links:

EntConnect website: www.entconnect.org

Twitter and apps:
Twitter: twitter.com
Tweetdeck: tweetdeck.com
Twhirl: twhirl.org
Search: search.twitter.com
Twitter tips & apps for journalists & everyone else:
assignmenteditorminds.blogspot.com/2009/03/twitter-tips-apps-for-journalists.html

Bill French links:
myst-technology.com
blogsite.com

4 comments:

  1. Hi Susan,

    You sound like a Twitter expert! I've never dipped my toe in it, nor Facebook, nor you name it. Maybe someday after I get over the shock that I have a blog!

    Bonnie

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  2. I'm no expert, either, Bonnie. One of the points of the EntConnect conference was - Learn. Share. Grow. Hope to learn more.

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  3. Don't give up. Once you master it, you will be glad you did.

    ReplyDelete